Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/46

 that. That was the time when I had my favourite ideals, which justified my lusts, and I tried to discover a theory which would allow me to look upon my lusts as a law of humanity. But as soon as the question of life arose in my soul in all its clearness, that answer at once was scattered to the winds, and I understood that, as in the experimental sciences there were real sciences and half-sciences, which attempted to give answers to questions which are not in their domain, so also in this sphere there was a whole series of wide-spread sciences which tried to answer to irrelevant questions. The half-sciences of this sphere, jurisprudence and the social sciences, try to solve the problems of man by apparently solving, each in its own way, the question of the life of all humanity.

But just as in the sphere of the experimental sciences a man who asks in all sincerity how to live cannot be satisfied with the answer, “Study in infinite space the modifications, infinite in time and complexity, of the infinite particles, and then you will understand all life,” just so a sincere man cannot be satisfied with the answer, “Study the life of all humanity, whose beginning and end we cannot know, and then you will understand your own life.” Just as in the experimental half-sciences, these half-sciences are the more filled with inexactness, obscurities, silliness, and contradictions, the farther they depart from the problems themselves. The problem of experimental science is a causal consecutiveness of material phenomena. Experimental science need only introduce the question of final cause, and nonsense is the result. The problem of speculative science is the consciousness of the causeless essence of hfe. It needs only introduce the investigation of causal phenomena, such as the social and historical phenomena, and the result is nonsense.

Experimental science gives positive knowledge and manifests the greatness of the human mind only when it does not introduce the final cause into its investigation.